Merlin and Nimue

Merlin has spent four books knowing everything. He has arranged Arthur's conception, set the test of the stone, foretold Mordred, warned Arthur about Guinevere, and told Balin what his stroke had cost.

Then a damsel comes to court — one of the ladies of the lake, called Nimue — and Malory's chapter heading is blunt about what happens next: How Merlin was assotted and doted on one of the ladies of the lake, and how he was shut in a rock under a stone and there died.

The account is not romantic and Malory does not make it so. Always Merlin lay about the lady to have her maidenhood, and she was ever passing weary of him, and fain would have been delivered of him, for she was afeard of him because he was a devil's son. She is not seducing him. She is being followed by a man she cannot get rid of and is frightened of, and she makes him teach her his craft as the price of putting up with him — which he does, because he cannot help demonstrating.

Before he goes he tells Arthur the whole thing in advance: that he will shortly be put into the earth alive, and that for all his craft he cannot prevent it. Arthur, reasonably, asks why a man who can see it coming does not simply stay away. Malory does not record an answer.

In Cornwall she shows him a marvel under a great stone, and he goes in to explain it to her, and she uses the magic he taught her to close it, and he never comes out.

Two things end here. One is the man. The other is harder to notice while it is happening: the enchantment goes with him. The first four books are thick with marvels; from this chapter on, the book gets steadily more political, more domestic, more concerned with kinship and grief, until the last books contain almost no magic at all — only people making decisions, without anyone left who can tell them what those decisions will cost.